I've had the plan to replace the 2-bay Qnap NAS and my HomeAssistant-and-other-stuff-serving Raspberry Pi 4 for a while now, and finally decided to act on it. After some research, here's what I came up with for the new NAS-and-homeserver-build of 2024:
- Jonsbo N2 ITX case
- Asus Prime N100I-D D4 mainboard with the Intel N100 CPU and passive cooling
- 16GB DDR4 RAM
- ASM1166-based M.2 to 6x SATA adapter
- beQuiet! SFX Power 3 300W PSU Corsair SF450 Gold Series PSU
- Noctua NF-A12x25 LS-PWM fan to replace the loud built-in drive bay fan in the case
- 256GB Intenso boot SSD
- 4TB Crucial MX500 SSD for the initial storage, to be expanded later
The case offers 5 bays for 3.5" HDDs, which I will mostly misuse with 2.5" SSDs instead riding on adapters so they properly fit. Found an adapter design that I liked and works perfectly on Printables.
The whole idea is to make this thing run silently and at very low power, and functionally replace both my old NAS and the Raspberry Pi "server". Software-wise, this will run OpenMediaVault 7 with Docker (via OMV Compose) for the "server" purposes.
Primary storage will be all-SSD. After some discussion on a different forum, I decided to bin all the plans for RAID and go with good ol' JBOD, and use multi-layer backups for redundancy. Those layers will be:
- Level 1: both 4TB HDDs from the old NAS running as in-system backup, plugged into slots 4/5 in the case, configured to spindown and only ever come online for nightly rsync snapshots of the primary storage.
- Level 2: external 8TB HDD that will stay plugged into the NAS, normally fully powered down via a smart power plug, only turned on and mounted automatically for weekly backups of Level 1 data, and then unmounted and turned back off.
The build went quite well, nothing complex here - everything is nicely plug-and-play, not much to go wrong. Only annoyance is that the mainboard doesn't have a Type-E USB header for the front Type-C port of the case. I left it unplugged for now, might get a PCI-E card with some C ports and an internal Type-E should the need actually arise at some point.
Some challenges that have come up:
- The built-in 120mm fan is quite loud, so from the start I got a PWM-controllable Noctua 120mm to replace it. Unfortunately, it is a fair bit thicker, and the power and SATA connections on the back of the drive bay board didn't clear:
Solution was found on Printables again, where someone else already had the same issue and designed an alternative mount for the fan that allows for extra thickness. Works perfectly.
- The beQuiet! PSU is... not that quiet. After figuring out how to control the Noctua fan in software based on SSD temps, the PSU fan is the only thing making noise at standby in this build - and I want it to be silent. Unfortunately, there is no way to control that fan. Fortunately, Corsair makes a series of SFX PSUs that fully shut down their fans below a certain power output - and they are fully modular on top of that, allowing me to save some unnecessary wiring while I'm at it. They are not easily available for sale, but I found a used SF450 in good nick and ordered it off Kleinanzeigen, should arrive in a couple days and allow to me properly enjoy the silence.